scendentalists themselves mention certain philosophers and poets as sources to which they are indebted for ideas and inspiration; certain critics, too, have discovered authors whom they aver to be in part antecedents of the movement; and, finally, from our own cursory acquaintance with world literature we may detect somewhat distinct analogies between what the New-England Transcendentalists have thought and written and what has been thought and uttered by precursors with similar proclivities.

In an early number of The Dial, Emerson asks how the age can be a bad one which gives him, among others, Plato, Plutarch, Saint Augustine, Donne, Sir Thomas Browne. In his essay on "Poetry and Imagination" we come across this sentence: "Socrates, the Indian teachers of the Maia, the Bibles of the nations, Shakespeare, Milton, Hafiz, Ossian, the Welsh Bards,-these all deal with nature and history as means and symbols, and not as ends." And Emerson's friend and literary adviser, Mr. Cabot, sets forth the following factors among others as having been influential on the mind and character of his comrade: Plutarch, Saint Simon, Boederer, Bishop Berkeley, Coleridge, Goethe, Swedenborg, J. Böhme, NeoPlatonists, Hindu philosophy, Bhagavat Gita, Upanishads, Puramas, Vedas, The Chaldean oracles, Hafiz, Enweri, S. Reid, Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Greek Mythology.1

2

Passing to Margaret Fuller, we find that in a letter dated June 3, 1833, she writes: "I part with Plato with regret. . . . Eutyphon is excellent. "T is the best specimen I have ever seen of that mode of convincing.... Crito I have read only once but like it. . . . The Apology I deem only remarkable for the noble tone of sentiment, and beautiful calmness." Mr. Frothingham, too, in his book on New-England Transcendentalism, gives the following authors as among those who appealed to Margaret Fuller: Goethe, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Michael Angelo, Dr. Wilkinson the Swedenborgian, Fourier, Rousseau. In his volume, "Concord and Merrimac Rivers," Thoreau quotes among others from such varied authors as Hindu sages, George Herbert, and Milton. And, finally, a certain Mr. Johnson, in an 1 Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Elliott Cabot, 2 vols., H., M. & Co., Cambridge, 1887.

* Transcendentalism in New England, O. B. Frothingham, Am. Unit. Assoc., Boston, 1903.

article entitled "Transcendentalism, "1 writes of the authors in general who helped to promote the movement: "From Descartes and Spinoza it descended through Leibnitz and Kant, and their later interpreters, Cousin and Jouffroy. It was developed in various forms by Schelling, Hegel, and the higher German metaphysics, and formed an essential part of the English and Scotch philosophies of Cudworth, Reid, and Hamilton, of the idealism of Coleridge and of the moral intensity of Carlyle.”

Out of these specific references, and other general data, we can abstract at least six influences on the New England Transcendentalists which preponderate over the rest; these six sources of influence are of Hindu, Persian, Greek, German, English, and French origin.

The fame of the literature and philosophy of the Hindu-Aryan people is not widespread. But scholars like Monier Williams and Max Müller have determined upon and brought to light much interesting matter. The following is a suggestive list of the notable productions of the Hindus: the "Hymns of the Veda," the "Upanishad" and "Bhagavadgéta" writings, the "Law Books of Menu," and the "Hetopadésa" (or Book of Good Council).

These writings of the Hindus tend, broadly speaking, to fix our attention on the Infinite and Eternal, on the regions which lie beyond human ken, on the whence and the wherefore of all things. They stand for the subjugation of the senses, for a life of reason and moderation, and uphold as blissful a kind of super-conscious state, an at-one-ness in freedom and tranquillity with the Life of the Universe that ever has been and ever will be. Transcendentalism, indeed, seems to have first manifested itself in pronounced yet quite mild form among the Hindus.

In the "Kartha Upanishad" we find a passage quite characteristic of Hindu occultism,—"If the slayer thinks I slay, if the slain thinks I am slain, then both of them do not know well; it (the. Soul) does not slay nor is it slain."2 The lines bear a striking resemblance to a stanza, which seems almost a paraphrase of the passage in the "Kartha Upanishad," in one of Emerson's poems entitled "Brahma,'

1 Transcendentalism, S. Johnson, Radical Review, Boston, Jan. 1, 1884.
2 Bibliotheca India, Calcutta, 1852.

From the Persians, a numerous and important branch of the Iranian group of the Aryan stock, have sprung not a few of the world's scholars, philosophers, and poets, But of all kinds of literary expression, the country is most noteworthy for its Oriental poetry. And the chief figures of the Persian Parnassus according to one of our New-England Transcendentalists, are: Firdausi, Enweri, Nisami, Jelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Jami.

One of the poems of Enweri, mystically symbolical of body and soul, has been rendered into English verse by Emerson:

"A painter in China once painted a hall;

Such a web never hung on an emperor's wall;
One half from his brush with rich colors did run,
The other he touched with a beam of the sun;
So that all which delighted the eye in one side,
The same, point for point, in the other replied.
In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found;
Thine the star-pointing-roof, and the base on the ground;
Is one half depicted with colors less bright?

Beware that the counterpart blazes with life!" 2

The most celebrated philosophers of Greece were Hellenes, a branch of the same Indo-European race as the Hindus and Persians. They may be divided into two classes, — (1) the philosophers of nature, such as Heraclitus and Democritus; and (2) the philosophers of nature and man, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. These philosophers, together with the Greek dramatists, were doubtless, in some measure, influential in their utterance on the Transcendentalists of New England. We make selections from the writings of one or two with a view to intimating their penchant toward Transcendentalism.

Heraclitus (535-475 B. C.), known among the ancients as the

1 Poems, H., M. & Co., p. 170.

' Body and Soul, Enweri, from Emerson's Persian Poetry.

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obscure, or the weeping philosopher, but withal, broad of outlook, deep of insight, sane, writes: "There is properly no existence but only becoming, that is, a continual passing from one existence into another." In a similar strain Emerson says: Power ceases the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a present state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.” 1

Plato (427-347 B. C.), a man of letters as well as idealistic philosopher of high order, the disciple of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, declares: "Through Love all the intercourses and converse of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried

on.

2

The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar." We have to compare with this an analogous passage from Sylvester Judd, a New-England clergyman and novelist of idealistic tendencies, who lived and wrote during the flood-tide of Transcendentalism in New England:

"Love is my food, my bed,

And roof. Love is my wing, my impulsive love,
And soul and circumstances, my joy and prayer.
In love I dwell in God, and God in me.

Not otherwise is seen the great Unseen." 3

The dramatist Euripides, who embodies the spirit of his age, and depicts human nature as it is, appears now and then in a passage to be a bit Transcendental: from Hippolytus,

"Try first thyself, and after call on God;

For to the worker God himself lends aid."

With this compare again certain lines from Emerson, —

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

The character and genius of the Greeks have, in fact, exercised powerful influence on the life and thought of the civilized world. Out of crude beginnings they developed wonderful harmony of

1 Self-Reliance, Essays, First Series, p. 45 ff., H., M. & Co., Cambridge, 1895. Symposium Source Book of Greek Philosophy, C. M. Bakewell. Philo - An Evangeliad, 1850.

body and mind. Belief in themselves, love of glory, freedom of religion, philosophical impulses, all helped to mould their character and determine the quality of their utterance. Their drama and philosophy, as well as their arts, are distinguished by depth, intellectual completeness, philosophical vividness. Without the Greek influence a deal that is Transcendental would never have come into being.

Of all people, however, Oriental or Occidental, the Germans plunge deepest and soar highest in the realm of Transcendentalism. Their poets and philosophers look far back into the past and peer far forward into the future. They are subjective like the Hindus, rather than objective, as were in large measure the Greeks. But their subjectivity is creative, assertive, renascent. They become now and then, as it were, intoxicated by the vastness of their own conceptions, sublimated by the depth and vitality of their own imaginings.

Kant (1724-1804), the critic of pure reason, would rivet our attention on two august facts:

"The starry heavens above,
And the moral law within."

And both the sense and spirit of this couplet were familiar to the New-England Transcendentalists. James Freeman Clarke, one of the members of the Transcendentalist Club, in characterizing his intimate friend, Theodore Parker, the noteworthy Unitarian preacher, writes in a similar strain: "He (Parker) belonged to that school of thinkers who are called Transcendentalists; who believe that man, as God's child, receives an inheritance of ideas from within; that he knows by insight; that he has intuitions of truth, which furnish the highest evidence of the reality of the soul of God, of Duty, of Immortality."1 Hegel (1770-1831), after the manner of Heraclitus, declares that God is a process of becoming.2 And Fichte (1762-1814), by a superb convolution of his cranium, transfers the centre of the universe from wherever else to his own bosom: "This earth of ours with all its splendors which in your

1 Memoirs, James Freeman Clarke.

History as a Manifestation of Spirit, F. H. Hedge, translation from Hegel.